


Leviathan

by lusilly



Series: Earth-28 [14]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman and Robin (Comics), DCU, DCU (Comics)
Genre: Character Study, College, Gen, School Project, Study Group
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-22
Updated: 2015-02-22
Packaged: 2018-03-14 13:23:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3412175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lusilly/pseuds/lusilly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Damian has a group project at Princeton, and his groupmates are annoying and useless and he doesn't care about them. Then they invite him to a party, and Damian starts to get suspicious.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Leviathan

**Author's Note:**

> Lupe & Deliwe belong to tumblr user glencocoabutter, Misha belongs to falloutgirlongirl. As the title suggests, it's a little bit of a low-key re-imagining of Morrison's Batman Inc. stuff, as well as set up for future brawls over the Demon's Head.
> 
> By the way Resurrection of Ra's al Ghul is mostly canon in Earth-28, except for One Major Detail that is mentioned in here. Although this fic references the larger canon of E28 through references to Restoration and the Streets of Gotham team (Colin, Nell, Lucas, etc.), it can be read standalone. Enjoooooooy :)

          “I don’t see why they couldn’t just come over to the Manor,” muttered Damian darkly, on the phone with his eldest brother. “But apparently two of them don’t even  _own_ cars-”

           “Oh wow,how inconsiderate of them.”

           “- _and_  my father said no. Something aboutnot wanting strangers in our home.”

           “Eh, they’d be too starstruck to get anything done anyways.”

           Damian peered out the glass wall of the study room in the library; he’d booked it a week ago, after all hopes of not having to leave his own home were dashed. He’dnever even met his groupmates; they’d been assigned by one of the TAs, and their first communication had resulted in a long line of emails that he eventually stopped opening, as everyone’s schedules seemed impossible to coordinate. Finally they had agreed on a time, and now he was here, on time, and the rest of his group were fifty, fifty-one, fifty-two seconds late already. Forty-nine seconds ago, annoyed at their tardiness, he had called Dick.

           “Look, Damian,” said Dick seriously. “Just give them a chance. You’ve been at school for two years now and you haven’t made any friends.”

           “I have all the friends I need back in Gotham.”

           “Well, now’s a good time to branch out, especially since you don’t have the Titans anymore.”

           Damian stiffened, but did not answer this; he was not yet ready, Dick sensed, to talk about the team he had personally dissolved, the friends he was no longer speaking to, and the first girlfriend to have broken his heart. “I don’t want friends,” he murmured. “I just want an A in this class.”

           At that, Dick let out a fond little laugh. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Is this the class you’re failing right now? I couldn’t believe it when Alfred told me. You’ve never failed anything in your life!”

           “Yes, well,” answered Damian impatiently, “apparently this class is built on ‘ _participation points_ ,’ whatever that means. So for the time being at least, I will be on campus entirely more often than I would like.” Peering out the glass wall, he added, “There’s a penthouse a few minutes away that I’d like to lease, but I’d need a loan from my father. I’m drawing up the proposal now-” Dick began to laugh, and Damian noticed someone heading straight for his study room, so hurriedly glanced away, pretending to write something in his notebook. “In any case, I can only pray that this goes quickly and my groupmates are not completely useless.”

           “I mean, they did get in to Princeton, so-”

           “I’ll talk to you later, Dick.” He hung up the phone just as the door to the study room swung open. Standing up, he held out a hand to greet someone with short dark hair and glasses. “Hello,” he said. “I’m Damian, pleasure to meet you.”

           “Yeah, same,” they answered, with a little smile. “I’m Lupe.” They shook his hand, their grip noticeably weaker than his; glasses meant shortsighted, and the left eye looked the slightest bit more magnified. No doubt reflexes on their left sight were impeded due to poor eyesight. Barely glancing them up and down, Damian estimated them to be approximately half his weight and at least four inches shorter than he was, leaning a little heavy on their right leg, betraying a doubly weak left side. “I’m glad we finally got everyone together,” they said, taking a seat on Damian’s right. It was all too easy: he could debilitate them in two moves and kill them in one (not that he would, and he felt bad for thinking it and made a half-hearted attempt to forget that he could do that). They smiled at him, then opened a backpack covered in anime pins and buttons and extracted a laptop with a Totoro sticker on it. At that moment, it occurred to Damian that, here at Princeton, there was really no need to size up everyone he met.

           “So,” they said, sliding a stack of stapled papers towards Damian. “I know we were only supposed to come up with the pitch for the first meeting, but I got excited and wrote out a script. I’m thinking alien-adventure supernatural thriller, like, big government conspiracy to cover up this whole thing, and the main character is out there fighting the aliens and FBI and then  _bam_ , they find out _they’re_ an alien, and-”

           Flipping through the script, Damian listened to Lupe ramble on. “I’m sorry,” he began, slightly confused, “maybe I misunderstood the prompt. Aren’t we supposed to be writing a one-man character sketch?”

           “One- _person_ ,” corrected Lupe, then they snatched the script out of his hands, looking down at it wistfully. “Yeah,” they said, seeming genuinely let down. “I guess so. But I was thinking-”

           The door to the study room banged open, and a tall kid with white-blonde hair appeared. He wore a button-up white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a red tie, and he also was rather uselessly holding the back of his hand up to his nostrils, trying-but-not-really to stem a light nosebleed.

           Before Damian even glanced around, the scent of blood straightened his back, kicked him into hypervigilance, ready to act in 0.011 seconds (at least, that was the speed of his reflexes the last time they had tested him, which had been about a year ago, and come to think of it he thought he was probably faster than that now)-

           At the door, the kid wiped his nose and sniffed strongly, observing Damian and Lupe. There was something in the gaze or shape of his eyes that somehow made him seem supremely bored. “Oh my God,” said Lupe, blinking up at him. “Are you OK?”

           Without saying anything, Damian reached into his own bag and took out his portable first aid kit. Sensing that this kid wouldn’t respond to his typical Robin injury queries, Damian just held out a set of antiseptic wipes. When he glanced down at them, then back at Damian’s face suspiciously, Damian asked, “Are you Misha?”

           He said nothing, then reached out, took the wipes and nodded. “Aren’t you Bruce Wayne’s kid?”

           “Yes,” answered Damian, watching Misha wipe his hands, then dab at his nose. It looked like the blood had mostly stopped, although a few drops had landed on his white shirt. “Who punched you?”

           “Nobody,” answered Misha coolly. “My friend told me to get a selfie with you.”

           “Your friend sounds very wise,” answered Damian. Gesturing at the table, he asked, “Please, sit.”

           Misha sat. When Lupe introduced themself, they did not offer Misha their hand. Damian suspected he would’ve turned the handshake down anyway. He still clutched a disinfectant wipe, stained pinkish with blood, tightly in his hand. Despite himself, Damian kind of liked this kid.

           “You know you should go to a hospital, man,” offered Lupe, watching Misha uncertainly. “I think your nose might be broken.”

           “It’s not,” said Damian, who had seen many broken noses in his work (and had more than once re-broken his nose to make sure it set right).

           Misha didn’t seem to care either way, taking out a folder full of papers as Lupe continued, “Well, I mean, I  _am_  pre-med and I volunteer at the hospital a lot, so I think I’d know…”

           Damian wanted to argue this, but as a finance major petitioning to double in architecture, he had to admit that Lupe’s credentials sounded more convincing. “Maybe,” he admitted, as Misha sniffed hard again. Damian could practically taste the blood in the back of his mouth.

           “I didn’t do a pitch,” said Misha, taking out a lined notebook page half full of untidy handwriting, “but I have a couple ideas.”

           He placed the handwritten page in the middle of the table, and Lupe took it eagerly. As Lupe began to comment on the quality (“This is good, but what if, like, there were aliens?”), Damian paused to look down at his own work: he had two hundred and sixty-one words written out before him, timed to take precisely two minutes to read aloud, as the directions for the assignment had suggested. He still could not understand why a face-to-face meeting with his groupmates was necessary, especially not when wild new technologies like Google Docs existed. While Lupe went on and on, Damian glanced sideways at Misha, feeling it was justifiable to size him up, just in case. About Damian’s height, skinnier but with a lithe build, more like Dick than Damian. Still, Damian could take him.

           “Can I ask where the accent’s from?” Damian asked abruptly, speaking over Lupe.

           Enthusiastically, Lupe began, “Oh, actually, my parents are Venezuelan-” but Misha said, “He means me,” which shut them up. Damian had meant Misha, but felt a little indignant at Misha stepping on Lupe.

           “Where in Venezuela?” asked Damian, ignoring Misha.

           “Mérida.”

           “Beautiful city,” said Damian, with an easy, charming smile.

           Lupe’s eyes lit up. “You’ve been there?” they asked.

           “I have. I considered studying abroad en la Universidad de los Andes, actually.” This was a lie, of course, but Damian had been in Colombia with Nightwing and El Gaucho once, which was pretty close to Venezuela. “Incredible botanical garden. The bromelia collection is exquisite.”

           This obviously delighted Lupe, who beamed proudly at Damian. At last turning to Misha, Damian asked, “And you, Misha?”

           He glowered at Damian, then answered, “I was born in Russia.”

           Southern Russia, judging from the accent. Since Misha had spoken so little, Damian had been unsure whether or not it might have been Ukrainian.

           “What about you, Damian?” asked Lupe. “Where are you from? I mean, I know Bruce Wayne is like, old Gotham money, but my aunt used to live in Gotham and she said you lived off somewhere with your mama as a kid and-”

           “No,” said Damian shortly. “I’m from here.”

           This wasn’t strictly true, but Damian thought it was easier than explaining the whole supervillainess mother thing, with which his family was not yet public.

           “That makes you the odd one out, then,” continued Lupe, unfazed. “Deliwe’s from Zimbabwe, she’s an exchange student but she’s been here for, like, three years. That’s OK though, we still like you even though you only have an  _American_ passport.” Lupe snickered, and Damian didn’t answer; he had fifty-eight passports, actually, and a machine underneath the Manor which could produce any other he might need in a moment’s notice. But no matter the blow to his pride, he didn’t think that this was something his father would be happy with him sharing.

           “Speak of the Devil,” said Lupe, then they frowned and added, “Not really, though, she’s actually really lovely.

           Once more, the door to the group study room opened and closed, and finally their fourth member was there. Reminded of the group’s general lack of punctuality and prepared to be exasperated, Damian turned towards the door.

           He stopped short, staring at the woman who quickly dropped a case by the side of the door, then sunk into a seat.

           “Hi,” she said, with a harried, artificial smile. “Sorry I’m late, I was at rehearsal.”

           “Oh, for the spring concert?” asked Lupe. Damian looked at the woman, then glanced distractedly at the case she’d left by the door, rectangular and a sleek black, locked shut. It was not, as far as he could tell, ticking, but he had seem many cases like that in his line of work and it unnerved him, to see something like that handled so blithely by a college student.

           “OK,” she began. “I sent you all copies of my pitch, but I was thinking that, since we all had such different ideas, it might be good if we just start brainstorming from scratch-”

           Damian didn’t say much throughout the meeting; Lupe and Deliwe worked the most, coming up with a simple idea and beginning a rough outline. Occasionally Misha would offer a comment, mostly to suggest some strange outlandish detail which, shockingly, Lupe and Deliwe generally approved.

           “Wait, wait, wait,” said Damian, when he could contain it no longer. “I’m sorry, what is  _asexual_? I don’t see what agamogenesis has to do with this.”

           Lupe blinked at him, surprised, then glanced somewhat warily at the other members of their group. It was Deliwe who took pity on him. “Asexuality is an sexual orientation,” she answered, too clearly, as if speaking to a child. “Defined by the lack of sexual attraction.”

           This didn’t quite comprehend to Damian. “What do you mean, lack of-?”

           “Come on,” said Lupe, with a shy little grin. “Haven’t you ever thought, like, you  _really_  loved a person, but like, you also weren’t really interested in sleeping with them?”

           “No,” Damian almost said, then hesitated. It had never occurred to him that maybe  _he_  was the one who was weird, for all his sexual interest in pretty much everyone who had ever given him the time of day. Chris, maybe? (Well, there was that series of wet dreams back before he dated Iris, but does it count if it’s in a dream?)

           Dubiously (and boredly) Misha asked, “You’re in an upper-div Queer Studies class, and you don’t know what asexuality is?”

           “Queer studies? I thought this was Ethnic Studies 182?”

           “It is,” answered Deliwe. “It’s cross-listed with Queer Studies 182.”

           This was news to Damian. He wanted to say something to indicate that he was not completely clueless, but he thought “My ex-girlfriend was bisexual” might not be a winner.

           “Hey,” continued Deliwe kindly. “Why don’t you tell us about your pitch? Maybe we can include some of your ideas in the final product.”

           All three of them were looking at him. For a second he didn’t know what to say, then he glanced down at the paper in front of him. “Yeah,” he said. “Right.”

           His pitch (all two hundred and sixty-one words of it) had proved difficult to write. His last semester had been packed full of thirty-six units of finance classes, on a fast track to his degree. In contrast, this class asked for a degree of creativity that he really wasn’t used to in his schoolwork (barring, of course, that time when he was thirteen and Alfred was having him read classic graphic novels, and one of his assignments had been to write a short comic himself. He still kept the inked pages pressed in a sketchbook in his room). Over chamomile tea and hot Cheetos on patrol with Stephanie one night, she’d listened to his gripes and then told him, “Well, they say write what you know. You want a cool, unbelievable character? Do yourself. Nobody’ll know it’s you.”

           He had followed her advice, condensing his massive, confusing, painful eighteen years of life down into two minutes spoken aloud. For some reason he had also changed the gender of his character, made her a girl instead of a boy like him. This was ostensibly, he thought, to distance the character from himself, so nobody would suspect anything. But he also wrote two hundred and sixty-one words about this girl and found himself deeply drawn to her, her being, girl and all, enough to rend him emotionally raw if he thought about her too long, like an exposed nerve.

           After he read the pitch out loud, he glanced around at the three of them tentatively.

           “A superhero,” drawled Misha, still sounding bored. “How original.”

           Quickly, Lupe said, “Be  _nice_ , Misha. He’s from Gotham, you know.”

           “What does that mean?” asked Damian, although he knew what it meant.

           “I like your idea,” said Deliwe, reaching out to touch Damian’s hand; instinctively he flinched away, but if she noticed she had no reaction. “I just think that,  _everybody’s_  going to be doing a derivative of Robin, and I’d like to do something a little more exciting than that.”

           This hit him like a blow to the chest. “She’s not Robin,” he protested. “I never said she was Robin. Look, she’s not a superhero, she’s a  _superheroine_ -”

           “Superheroine,” repeated Misha, slouching in his seat. “I knew a kid who OD’d on that in high school.”

           Deliwe, who had for some reason decided to defend Damian, muttered, “Shut up, Misha.”

           She and Lupe went back to their planning, once in a while throwing a bone to some particular detail of Damian’s own character. “I like the name,” said Lupe. “ _Jasmin_. So pretty.”

           “Yeah,” offered Misha. “And her supporting cast can be Ariel, and Belle, and Aurora…”

           The three of them laughed a little bit, dismissed the idea, and moved on. Damian liked all three of those names, especially Aurora, and didn’t understand what was so funny about them. This, combined with still being offended that they so quickly dismissed his idea, made him annoyed and disgruntled. He said very little. At some point he started to sketch in the margins of his notebook, mostly geometric shapes like mini floorplans of the Martha Wayne Building he was designing for Neon Knights, which Tim still dropped snitty comments about, sure he wouldn’t get the blueprints in on time. Yeah, well, fuck Tim.

           (Tim! That was one person he liked, kind of, who he didn’t want to sleep with. Smugly, he smirked at Deliwe.)

           Then his gaze slipped past Deliwe, to the sleek black case she had brought with her. Such a case just didn’t make sense for a college student to be lugging around campus. Unless, of course, the college student in question was Damian. Or some other young agent with a secret identity and a mission that required what Damian suspected to be a long-range sniper rifle, unassembled and carried in what was otherwise a very innocuous-looking case.

           An exchange student from Zimbabwe. A perfect cover story for a shady, unspecific past, a past that might be similar to Damian’s own.

           “Awesome!” said Lupe excitedly, typing something into their computer. “This has been so productive. I’ll send copies to everyone. Misha, are you on Facebook?” As Damian peered suspiciously at the black box, Misha gave Lupe his information. Then they turned to their left and asked, “Damian?”

           Damian’s gaze snapped back to them. “What?”

           Lupe gestured at their screen. “Do you have a Facebook? Messaging is probably the easiest way for us all to keep in contact.”

           “Oh,” said Damian. “Um, no, I don’t.” Damian did have a Facebook, but it was on a network managed by Oracle protected on highest security. There was a whole secret underbelly of Facebook where superheroes social networked with each other, and when Damian thought about it too long he thought it was unbelievable and also incredibly embarrassing, so he wasn’t on it often. Dick kept spamming him with baby animal videos and scandalous stories about him from tabloids anyway.

           “OK, what’s your phone number then?” asked Lupe; Damian didn’t answer this, partly because he wasn’t listening and also partly because he no longer carried his non-urgent unencrypted phone, which was the only number he would even consider giving to them.

           Distracted, mind racing with hypotheticals born of that annoying black box, Damian asked, “Deliwe, what’s in the case?”

           Deliwe glanced around. “What? Nothing.”

           “No, really,” said Damian, and he tried to give her a charming smile but to the group it just looked like he was baring his teeth. “What’s in the case?”

           “Nothing,” she answered. “Not your business.”

           “It might be.”

           “I really doubt it.”

           “Deliwe,” he said, seriously. “Just tell me what’s in the box.”

           The tension in the room thickened, Damian and Deliwe staring each other down. “Um,” said Lupe. “We’re pretty much done here. Don’t you have a long ride ahead of you, Damian?”

           “I’m serious,” said Damian.

           “Oh my fuck,” said Misha, rolling his eyes aggressively. “Tell him what’s in the box so we can all go home.”

           “I don’t have to tell him anything. It’s my stuff.”

           Damian didn’t say anything. Again, Lupe tried to defuse the situation, but then Damian cocked his head slightly, watching Deliwe. “I think I know what’s happening here,” he said.

           “Do you?” she retorted, without turning to look at him.

           “Yeah,” he said. “I do.” Glancing at Lupe and Misha, he said, “Maybe the two of you should go. Deliwe and I need to have…a conversation.”

           Her chair scraped along the flood as Deliwe got to her feet and said impatiently, “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

           She took the heavy black case and heaved it onto the table before Damian, then fished a key out of her backpack and unlocked it. Instantly Damian was also on his feet, surveying the room, calculating the best possible way to get Lupe and Misha out unharmed, also wracking his brain to think of who it might be that Deliwe was here to assassinate – a thrill of fear and alarm when he thought, _damn_ , it might be him-

           Then Deliwe opened the case, and Damian stopped, frowning down into it.

           Pointing at the instrument inside the case, Damian asked, “What is that?”

           “That,” said Deliwe calmly, “is a bagpipe.”

           There was an awkward pause.

           Lupe, delighted, asked, “You play the  _bagpipe?_  That’s amazing!”

           One eyebrow cocked, Deliwe asked, “What was that conversation you wanted to have, Wayne?”

           Damian had no answer to this. He had made a fool of himself by following his instincts and doing everything that he had been trained his whole life to do. It was patently unfair, and hugely embarrassing.

           “I…play…an instrument. As well. So. I was just…very interested…in…”

           Misha blew a loud raspberry with his mouth, picked up his books, and stood up. “This has been terrible,” he said. “Bye.” He headed towards the door, then stopped and looked back at Damian. “Oh, and for real. Nobody punched me. I’m anemic.”

           He ditched, and Damian watched him go.

           Deliwe put her bagpipe away, said, “I’ll email you,” to Lupe curtly, then left as well.

           Putting her laptop away, Lupe looked up at Damian and said, “I really did like your character pitch. Jasmin is  _such_  a pretty name.”

—-

           Damian’s class ended at 2:20 in the afternoon. As everyone around him began to pack up their things, he stared down at a paper which his TA had handed back to him.

_Damian – this is completely different from the rest of your group’s work, so I’m counting it as incomplete. Resubmit by Friday for half credit._

           He found this incredible annoying, but didn’t know what to do about it. Yes, it was nothing like the rest of his group, because the rest of his group was stupid and useless and didn’t know what they were doing. Jasmin was an infinitely better character than anything they had come up with.

           Finally, he packed up his things and slowly made his way out of the room. His father didn’t keep tabs on his studies or his grades, but, proud of his creativity, he’d told Alfred all about the assignment, and no doubt the old man would want to know Damian’s grade. Thus he had no desire to get back to the Manor quickly.

           As he was heading out of the lecture hall mopily, someone tapped him on the shoulder. Suspecting it was his TA, trying to ‘connect’ with him because she ‘cares about her students,’ he turned around wearily, excuses for leaving quickly on the tip of his tongue.

           It was not his TA. Deliwe stood there before him, her box braids cascading down her back, bright pink lipstick framing her mouth. “How’d you do?” she asked, nodding at the paper in his hands.

           He glowered at her. “You first.” She held up her paper, showcasing an  _A_ and a little smiley face at the top. This irritated him even further. Taking the hint, she grinned but didn’t ask him again.

           “Maybe we just need to do some more group work,” she offered. “Are you free tonight?”

           “No,” he answered; this was not technically a lie, given that he had agreed to work with Colin’s team in Gotham to solve a succession of murders in Oldtown which the police had written off as gang disputes. Of course Damian doubted that meeting with his group would last past midnight, when he was meant to meet up with Colin and the others, but he’d rather forego another social humiliation altogether. “But if you’d like to forward me a copy of your paper, I wouldn’t object.”

           Deliwe laughed. “I don’t think so. You’re not the first rich boy to fail an Ethnic Studies course, and you definitely won’t be the last.”

           “I wouldn’t fail,” he countered, “if you all had just gone with my idea.”

           “Yes, well, as terrible as this country is, it’s still a democracy, and you lost three against one.” Damian held back a scowl, but sincerely hoped she could see it in his narrowed gaze. When Deliwe opened her mouth again, Damian prepared to turn on his heel and leave if she made another crack about him being a  _rich boy_ , but instead she said, “And I’m not asking for the group. A bunch of us are going to the Street tonight for a party and you have such a stick up your ass I thought it might be good for you to branch out.”

           “I do not have a stick up my-”

           “Let me guess,” she interrupted. “Business major?”

           He glared at her. “Finance.”

           She nodded knowingly.

           “ _And_  architecture,” he added defensively.

           “You like art?”

           “I love art. Thank you.”

           “Then why aren’t you an art major?”

           “Because,” answered Damian, “I’d prefer a degree with an actual use.”

           “There is definitely,” she sighed, “a stick lodged halfway up your ass, kid.”

           This offended Damian so much it rendered him speechless for a moment, and then anger flared and he spat back, “Unlike  _art_ students like yourself, I don’t have the time to waste at frivolous social events.”

           This made her laugh, for some reason. “Close,” she said. “But I’m music theory, not art. Even more useless.” She flashed him a smile. “Just come to the party tonight. It’ll be fun. Lupe and Misha’ll be there.”

           “Because I  _so_  enjoy their company.”

           Deliwe tucked her paper into a folder in her arms. “Do you enjoy _anything?_ ” she asked, seriously.

           He was taken aback, and so did not answer right away; by the time he had come up with a response that was halfway decent, she had already waved him goodbye and was walking away. He had seen several American teen movies in the past few years, so he knew that to call something out as she walked away could only end up looking pathetic, but  _shit_  if he didn’t really, really want to do it anyway.

           On the ride back to the Manor, an hour or so on his motorcycle, he went through every possible retort he didn’t think of in the moment and ranked them in terms of which would have been the most emotionally satisfying. It was only when he got back to the Manor and was greeted by Alfred the cat, a gift from Selina after that time he worked in her animal shelter in penance for punching her in the face, that he realized responses number three through six were incredibly misogynistic.

           He didn’t know what this Street that Deliwe mentioned was, so he Googled it, then was rescued by an email sent to his Princeton account. Not only did Deliwe assume that he was indeed coming, but she was so confident that she had added a little note on the end:  _P.S. Can you pick Lupe up? They live on campus_. She had provided Lupe’s phone number as well. This galled Damian: how dare she assume so much, how dare she think he’d do something as nice as-

           His phone rang. For a split second he thought it must be Lupe, then he remembered that he hadn’t given them his number, so it must be someone here in Gotham. On business.

           When he answered, it was Colin. “Hey,” he said. “We still on for that thing tonight? Nell dropped out for some reason, you two aren’t still fucking around, are you?”

           It was very much like Colin, to open a conversation with so little subtlety. “Hello, Colin,” answered Damian. “No, Nell and I are over. Isn’t she seeing Luke?”

           “Lucas?”

           “No, Luke. Batwing.”

           “Batwing?” echoed Colin. “That guy in Africa?”

           “No, Colin, Luke  _Fox_.”

           “Oh, yeah. That won’t last. I’m all over Luke.” Colin snorted with laughter. Damian knew that he was not remotely ‘all over’ Luke, had had absolutely zero chance of tapping that, but Colin had a tendency to stake claim on hot men by invalidating their relationships with women, and that was something Damian didn’t have the energy to fight right then and there. “But we’re still doing the thing, right?”

           “I don’t know,” replied Damian. “Some girl at school invited me to a party, and I-”

           “Shit! A college frat party!”

           “I don’t think it’s a fraternity-”

           “Is it the gay frat? Can I come?”

           “No,” said Damian. “I mean, it’s not the gay fraternity. I don’t think-” He paused; it was useless to try to explain to Colin, who always thought he knew what had been said before anybody had even said it. “I don’t know,” he continued, glancing back at the email from Deliwe. “If you need me for the mission tonight-”

           “Fuck the mission! Go fuck some bitches.”

           He snickered, and Damian frowned. “I’ve asked you before to please not use that word-”

           “Oh, the fuck ever. Go party. Get super wasted, then drunk text me.”

           Conversations with Colin were generally one-sided, but Damian couldn’t deny that he appreciated his friend’s enthusiasm for his social wellbeing. “I promise I will,” said Damian. “We can reschedule if-”

           “I have a team now, remember? We’ll be fine on our own.”

           This was a fair point, and Damian had promised his father that he would let the Gotham team start to develop their strengths more independently. He glanced back at the email from Deliwe, and Lupe’s phone number. “If you’re sure,” he began, and Colin assured him he was completely positive, and enviously added, “Snapchat me pics of  _anyone_  you make out with, OK?” before he finally agreed to hang up.

            So it was that a few hours later he was picking Lupe up from their dorm on campus, listening to them chatter on excitedly about his ride. “I’ve never been on a motorcycle before!” they said, as Damian handed them a helmet. “Isn’t it dangerous?”

           “If you don’t know what you’re doing,” he replied. “Fortunately I’ve been riding these for years now.”

           Climbing on the motorcycle behind him, Lupe began to ask, “How old are you again-?” but Damian took off, the engine roaring beneath them, and the deafening wind in their ears overpowered the question.

            As soon as they arrived, Damian felt a sudden rush of gratitude that he’d been asked to bring Lupe; they stuck with him from the get-go, pointing people out to him, explaining who’s who and then getting very surprised when he didn’t know a local celebrity. “Well,” Lupe said fairly, shoving a drink into his hand, “you _are_  Bruce Wayne’s son, so.”

           This was not the first time someone at Princeton had said this to him, so he asked, voice raised to be heard above the music, “What does that mean?”

           Lupe sipped their drink, then glanced back at him, eyes wide and innocent. “You know,” they said. “All us little people, we want to know all the famous people in the general vicinity. You? You  _are_  the famousest person in the general vicinity.”

           They laughed, then grabbed him by the arm and said, “Hey, do you want to dance?”

           He wanted to say, “Not really,” because the last time he’d danced in a club with someone, it had ended with some mostly-clothed frottage in a bathroom stall, and he was still embarrassed about it. But Lupe was so enthusiastic and a little bit cute but not in the usual way that Damian was attracted to, so he didn’t reject their proposal, just threw his drink back and let them take his hand.

           “If I’m so famous,” said Damian, almost shouting over the music; in the tight space, Lupe was backed up against him, their body lightly pressed against his, “how come it seems like you’re the only one who recognizes me?”

           Lupe laughed, turned around, and placed their hands on his shoulders, still moving to the rhythm of the music. “It’s not like you’re a Kardashian,” they said pointedly; given that they were right in his face, there was really no need for them to yell over the music, but they did so anyway. “Somebody’d have to be from Gotham or a bigtime reader of  _Newsweek_  to recognize your face.”

           Damian thought about this. “I’m in  _Newsweek_?”

           “Your dad just had that interview about the future of the company,” Lupe shouted back. “There was that picture of you and him in it. You know, that one with the dog.”

           Damian knew which photo they were talking about, taken a few years ago on a hike which was undertaken ostensibly to produce some father-son bonding time, a goal at which it had utterly failed. It wasn’t that Damian was so opposed to spending quality time with his father; it was just that Bruce Wayne was so patently _bad_  at feelings, and Damian didn’t have the time nor emotional energy to coach his father through filial intimacy. In any case, he hadn’t known that his father had allowed the photo to run in a national magazine. Despite himself, he felt a little bit violated.

           “Nice dog,” Lupe shouted. “Great Dane?”

           Damian nodded. “He died,” he replied, but Lupe couldn’t hear him over the music.

           He excused himself, but Lupe didn’t seem to notice. “I love this song!” they screeched, dancing enthusiastically along to the beat. Damian went to get himself another drink. Maybe he would take Colin’s advice, after all, and get completely wasted beyond the point of coherence, then drunk text Colin and maybe Lian too, although that was probably a bad idea. Unfortunately it took quite a bit of effort for Damian to get drunk, something he chalked up to excellent health and also possibly a little bit of invulnerability keyed into his genetic code by his mother.

           The thought of this upset him, and he glowered at the trashcan keg of Jungle Juice. Couldn’t even go to a goddamn college party without getting mad about his mother, and someone else mentioning his father.  This was precisely why he preferred to stay in Gotham to begin with. At least there, he knew at least as much about everyone else as they knew of him.

           Angrily, he glanced around, wishing that he had invited Colin so they could do shots together. Just as the thought passed through his mind, someone sidled up to him

           “Hi,” said Deliwe, grinning at him. She held a shot glass in her hand, and offered it to him. “You look like you’re having fun.”

           That comment was sarcastic, he suspected. He took the glass from her and downed the shot, then placed it back in her hand. “Get me another one?”

           “I’m not your butler,” she replied, which was nonsense, because Alfred thought taking shots was unrefined, and that if Damian was going to drink alcohol he’d much rather it be dark liquor. “Glad to see you made it.”

           Damian nodded at the dance floor, where Lupe had moved on to a different dance partner. “I couldn’t leave Lupe stranded without a ride.”

           “Very thoughtful. I’m glad you could come.”

           “Sure,” he said. “Want to dance?”

           Damian actually was beginning to like Lupe, but in the sort of protective, paternalistic way that being Robin often enabled. But Deliwe didn’t have any reservations about hurting his feelings, which appealed to him, and also she was super hot and seemed to know something that he didn’t know (why else would she be a music theory major?) and she was competitive and smart and all of those things made Damian want to grind up against her and hook up, no matter his terrible track record with embarrassing hookups.

           “Not really,” she said back, and she raised her left hand; for a moment in the semi-darkness Damian didn’t know what he was looking at, and then he saw the glint of a ring on her finger, and his eyebrows shot up in surprise.

           “Oh,” he said. “Well. It’s just a dance. Surely your husband wouldn’t mind.”

           “My fiancée,” she corrected. “And no, she probably wouldn’t mind a dance, but you look like the kind of kid who starts off all of his sexual pursuits with  _just a dance_.”

           This was not true, Damian thought? But in retrospect he was beginning to doubt that. He took another drink of the foul alcoholic mix in his red Solo cup.

           “How old are you, anyway?” she asked.

           Eighteen. “Twenty,” he said. “Twenty-one,” he corrected himself, for some reason thinking that at a college party, she might be concerned with the legal American drinking age. Frustrated that he didn’t know the right answers to her questions, he countered with, “And you?”

           “Twenty-three,” she answered. This had been Damian’s estimate, based on observations of her hands and gait.

           “Is your fiancée here tonight?” he asked her, which was not intended as a come-on but he wouldn’t mind if things ended up that way.

           “Oh, no. She lives in North Carolina.”

           “Mm? And what does she do in North Carolina?”

           “NASCAR,” answered Deliwe.

           Damian blinked. “The car racing?”

           “No, the philosophical school of thought,” she replied. “Yes, the car racing, dumbass.”

           There were some things about American culture that Damian doubted he would ever understand; NASCAR was one of these. As much as he tried to think of a conversation starter about it, he came up so empty-handed that he decided to just take another drink rather than continue to struggle.

           “You’re a rich kid,” said Deliwe, watching him slyly. “Don’t you like fast cars?”

           “Maybe,” he answered. “But I’m also not white trash, so I don’t like NASCAR.”

           She giggled, reached out, and clapped him on the cheek. “I’ll give that one to you,” she said. “It’s an American thing, anyway. I don’t get it either.” She pointed past Damian’s shoulder and added, “You’ve got a shadow.”

           Damian turned around; Misha hovered there beside someone else with short blue hair. Annoyed at Misha by the very fact that he had interrupted his conversation with Deliwe, Damian turned back around to look at her, but she was already gone.

           “Hey,” said Misha loudly, over the music; Damian noticed there was no drink in his hand. Nodding at the person next to him, he said, “This is the friend who told me to take a selfie with you.”

           This did not interest Damian. “Oh,” he said. “Did you see where Deliwe went?”

           Misha looked ready to respond, but he was interrupted by the blue-haired someone next to him, who watched Damian suspiciously. “I thought Bruce Wayne’s son was, like, forty. And, like. White.”

           “You’re probably thinking of my brother,” responded Damian. “He’s thirty-five.” As an afterthought, he added, “And he’s not white either.”

           Satisfied with this, the blue-haired one darted forward, held out her phone, and took a blurry selfie with Damian. The flash was so bright in the semi-darkness that Damian found himself blinking spots out of his eyes for a few moments. “What’s Gotham like?” they asked. “Have you ever met the Joker?

           Instantly, Damian’s expression fell into a glower. He hated Joker fans, mostly because he knew that they had never seen true devastation, never seen true chaos, and so had no concept of how truly horrifying the Joker’s grotesque grin really was. Also because once upon a time the Joker had fooled him into admiration, so well that Damian had at first mistaken the clown for his own father.

           “No, I never have,” he answered. “But I’ve known many of his victims.” This shut them up. Or if it didn’t, he didn’t care, because he turned to Misha. “Drink?”

           Misha shook his head. After a minute or so, the blue-haired college kid left them, torn away by some other friends. “I liked your character pitch,” said Misha. “Except for the name.”

           Damian glanced at him warily. “Thanks,” he said. “Do you come to these parties a lot?”

           Inwardly, Damian cringed. Even if that hadn’t been intended as a pick-up line, it still sounded like a terrible one.

           “Not really,” answered Misha. “Heard a certain little bird might be here. I like birds.”

           This made zero sense to Damian, who downed the rest of his drink, beginning to feel a warm and welcome buzz. He could probably forgive Misha for his cryptic ramblings, if only because Misha was tall and skinny and very pale, which was a combination that Damian very, very much liked.

           “Are you sure you don’t want a drink?” pressed Damian, fetching more for himself. “It might help you loosen up a bit.”

           At this, a smile flashed across Misha’s face; Damian grinned, triumphant, sensing that this was a rare victory. “You’re the one who thought a twenty-year-old college student was packing serious heat.”

           Damian wanted to correct him that Deliwe was twenty-three, not twenty, but he restrained himself.

           “Besides,” added Misha, his eyes roaming over the rest of the party, as if searching for someone, “I know you just want to get drunk and try and make out with me, so why would I agree to that?”

           This seemed paradoxical to Damian, who could not imagine not wanting to make out with himself. “What’s wrong with two people acting on their attraction to one another?”

           Misha eyed him. “Who said I was attracted to you?”

           Damian, who was used to people being attracted to him, was taken aback by this. “Fine,” he said, topping off his drink and standing up straight. “Then I’ll take my pursuits elsewhere, I suppose.”

           Misha almost looked amused. “Quite,” he said.

           So it was that Damian gave up on ‘bonding’ with his groupmates, and decided to take Colin’s advice and get shitfaced, even if it was all by himself.

           A few hours later, the lights had dimmed even further, someone had ramped up the bass, and the party was closer, hotter, more intimate. In the darkness Damian couldn’t quite see the face of whoever it was he was grinding up against, and the thought vaguely occurred to his hazy mind that he liked it much, much better this way.

           Someone grabbed hold of his arm, and he grinned and slurred, “Hold on, baby, I’ll get to you when-”

           The grasp was tight and suddenly, in a move so clean that it had to come from military training, someone wrenched down on his upper body, kicking his ankles out to bring him to the ground. Instantly, without thought, Damian’s body responded instinctually, neutralizing the threat by twisting around to regain his balance and swinging the other person, hard, up across his back and onto the floor.

           The music didn’t stop, but everyone around him did, eyes widening, taking a few steps back. The person who had grabbed Damian was on the floor, groggy but not unconscious. Quickly Damian knelt down to perform a quick jab to the forehead, a delicate move to cause unconsciousness that, if performed incorrectly, could kill.

           Someone else reached out and grabbed Damian’s hand before he touched his mysterious attacker; again, out of instinct he rammed an elbow into their face, but they deftly dodged the move, still holding onto his fingers. When he looked up, to his surprise he saw Lupe crouching next to him. “Come on,” theysaid, tugging at his hand. “Let’s get you out of here.”

           They pulled him away from the crowd, from the loud, pulsing music, out to the back of the building. Everything was slightly blurry in Damian’s eyes, and his hearing was a little off, dulled by the loud music inside, but he saw Misha leaning against the wall, a lit cigarette between his teeth. Someone handed Damian a water bottle, and he protested, “What’s going on? Who was that guy?”

           Lupe and Misha ignored him. Behind Damian, there were the sounds of high heels along the concrete alleyway; he turned around, but the move proved too sudden for him, and he became very dizzy. The high heels, it seemed, belonged to Deliwe, appearing from the street. Lupe said something to her, and she shook her head.

           “If they’d wanted him dead,” said Deliwe, as Damian leaned one hand against the wet, mossy wall, and vomited onto a pile of trash bags, “he’d be dead. So would everyone in there.”

           “But they’re not,” countered Lupe, patting Damian on the back. “So I was right. It isn’t who you thought it was.”

           “Maybe,” muttered Misha. “But as strategies go, that one sucked. You can’t just lock a bunch of kids in a room and hope they don’t all get blown up.”

           “I can,” said Lupe, “and I just did.”

           “You’re both right,” said Deliwe. “It was risky, but it paid off.”

           “Wait,” said Damian, trying to stand up straight; it threw off his depth perception whenever he tried to do so, so he stayed leaning with one hand against the wall. “Hold on. You…”

           Lupe patted him on the back again. “Shhh, Mr. Wayne.”

           Trying very hard to patch together coherent thoughts, Damian asked thickly, “Do you…work for my father?”

           Misha let out a harsh bark of a laugh. Now that he was no longer maintaining whatever façade he had had on earlier, his Russian accent was much more distinct. “No, but I don’t think it’d hurt if you passed along your highest recommendations, my friend.”

           “No,” said Deliwe, shooting at glare at Misha. “We don’t work with the Bat, and we have no intention of doing so.”

           “Do you work – did my mother hire you?”

           “Yes,” said Deliwe, and Misha and Lupe said, “No.”

           “Think of us as subcontractors,” said Lupe kindly, to Damian. “We don’t know anything about your family, Mr. Wayne, we’re just here to do what we do best.”

           There was only one thing people subcontracted by the League of Assassins would be good at, so Damian asked bluntly, “Kill people?”

           “No,” Misha shot back. “Protect your ass.”

           Damian was very drunk, and very confused, and almost got out his phone to text Colin. But, suspecting he was supposed to be offended, he managed, “I can protect myself.”

           “You can’t even stand up right now,” Lupe reminded him.

           Damian spluttered, “But – I’m-”

           Before Damian could say it, Misha placed a finger over his own lips and said, “You’re a little bird. We know. But this is bigger than Gotham, and there are bad guy behind the scenes even your Daddy War-Bats doesn’t know.”

           Even though he was supremely drunk, Damian still violently hated that pun.

           “Look,” said Deliwe, standing before him with her hands on her hips, “kid. In case you’ve forgotten, Ra’s al Ghul and Nyssa Raatko are dead. You are the only remaining heir to the Demon’s Head, and everybody knows that the best way to get to Mommy is through her baby bird.”

           Damian shot back, “I’m not a  _baby_ -” and Misha snickered at him.

           “If they get you, they can get Talia,” Deliwe continued, ignoring this. “This is the kind of thing that flies under the Bat’s radar, given that most of it is internal discontent within the League. But to be honest, if your parents didn’t act so much like bitter suburban divorcees, maybe she’d have filled him in by now.”

           “However,” said Misha, the Russian accent making it difficult for Damian to understand him, intoxicated as he was, “once again, I would not mind a recommendation to the Big Guy – I will give you my card, if-”

           “Oh, give up, Misha,” said Lupe, shaking their head. “You know he’s not even going to remember this anyway.”

           Squinting through the darkness, Damian began, “Remember wh-?” but then Lupe gently pressed something into the skin of his neck, and what little light was left slipped beyond his gaze.

——

           In the morning, Damian woke up with a dull pounding in his head and a swell of nausea when he got out of bed, but it was nothing compared to injuries he’d had in the past. He took a few aspirin, brushed his teeth, then took a shower. Under the steady stream of hot water, steam rising to fog up the ornate mirror of the grand bathroom, he closed his eyes and tried to remember what had happened the previous night. He remembered getting to the party, dancing with Lupe, unsuccessfully trying to flirt with Misha, and then things started to fade. Judging from the taste in his mouth when he woke up, he had vomited at some point. This was not surprising to him: he knew he had a delicate stomach, and pouring it full of alcohol was eventually going to result in such a reaction.

           He turned off the shower, stood dripping wet before the mirror. Steam rose from his hot skin as he met his own dark gaze in the mirror. He didn’t remember getting home. He didn’t remember where his motorcycle was. And he certainly didn’t remember making it all the way up to his bedroom in the middle of the night, drunk out of his mind. No doubt his father, Alfred, or both would be waiting downstairs for to lecture him on his irresponsibility.

           When he finally headed down the grand staircase of Wayne Manor, the house was quiet. Outside, it was bright. Birds fluttered amongst the turning leaves of tall trees behind the house, and something came back to Damian, like a flash of light, a glimpse beyond the curtain. A voice, a heavy Russian lilt: “ _Little bird…_ ”

           Alfred was in the kitchen, humming a gentle, familiar tune that Damian couldn’t place. “Ah, Master Damian,” he said brightly, when Damian entered. “I’ve prepared some scrambled egg whites and spinach, and I insist you eat some. You hardly ate anything last night, and were out so late. How many times need I remind you to call if you intend to be out past four?”

           Damian knew this, and had made it a habit to do so in the past few years. That neither Alfred nor his father had come looking for him, furious and disappointed, said much about how they had grown to trust him.

           And Damian was not about to waste that trust by telling Alfred something as inconsequential as the truth. So he gratefully accepted a plate of egg whites and spinach, as well as the bottle of hot sauce which was shared almost exclusively by him and Cass (and, on occasion, Jason), and stayed silent.

           “Once you’re finished,” added Alfred, “please take your motorbike down into the garage. I don’t know what possessed you to leave it out front, but I will not waste my valuable time cleaning up after you, young man. Do you understand me?”

           Alfred’s tone was firm, but also light. Damian nodded, poking at his eggs with his fork. “I will,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

           Neither of them said anything for another moment, then Alfred said, “All right then. I am off to do my utmost to wake your father. He’s gotten quite worse than you are, Master Damian.” With a gentle smile, he left. Damian was alone in the big kitchen.

           Again, he went through his limited memories of the previous night. Something about it made him feel on high alert, hyper-vigilant, like there was someone else in the room with him even though he knew there was no one. He remembered Deliwe’s email; Colin’s call; picking Lupe up from their dorm. Dancing with them at the party. “ _You_ are _the famousest person in the general vicinity_.”

           Damian got up from his seat and went to a corner of the kitchen, where there were stacks of newspapers and magazines piled high on several shelves. The top shelf as full of publications Bruce hadn’t read yet, the middle ones he intended on reexamining, and the bottom shelf those he deemed important enough to keep. Damian didn’t really understand the point of this, when all of this information could just as easily be accessed from the Batcomputer, but his father was from a different time, he supposed. For a while, Damian rooted through the shelves, unsure where it would be. Finally, buried deep on the bottom shelf, he found the copy of  _Newsweek_  with his father on the cover. It was a pointless, annoying photoshoot and they’d done in the garden and the pool house of the Manor, while Damian went out to spend time with Colin because he hated being in the house when there were reporters around his father. It was as if the man turned into a completely different person.

           He opened the magazine, flipped through to the interview with his father.

           In the photo, he was only fourteen. It was before all of this, not too long after his father had come back to Gotham, replacing Dick as Damian’s Batman. Damian had not been pleased to begin with, and he knew that he had not been easy to work with, either. Despite himself, he glanced through the words on the page, searching for his name.

            _Damian knows what he’s doing. He’s just a boy, but he’s even better at this than I am already. I know one day he’ll be a fine leader._

He looked back at the photograph of him and his father. For some reason, something seemed off; he narrowed his eyes, then realized what it was. The photo was cropped. The framed image that Alfred had tucked down in the Cave, to remind them, Damian suspected, that they may be Batman and Robin but they were also father and son, included a third subject: the dog. Titus was not in this photograph at all.

           Lupe’s face flashed in his mind, lit up by the strobing lights of the party. “ _Nice dog. Great Dane?_ ”

           By the time Alfred finally managed to drag Damian’s father down to breakfast, Damian had replaced the magazine at the bottom of the stack, and ate his breakfast in silence.

——

           He ended up with a B+ in the class.

 


End file.
